THE APANI FASHION SHOW is a chance for many in the fashion industry; photographers, designers and those with money and creative flair, to come together and celebrate what their industry has to offer. The annual two-day event has grown substantially since its inaugural event four years ago, and shows no sign of slowing. One of the attendees this year is Thomas Corfield, an emerging writer of Imaginative Realism; a new fiction genre in which a lack of audience is compensated for with an unbridled enthusiasm for unconventional punctuation and a complete lack of grammatical awareness. I’d agreed to interview Thomas after receiving over a hundred requests from him demanding I do so, and that he’d take to the catwalk naked if I refused. In the interests of public health, I agreed, but not before forwarding his correspondence to police. There was, after all, the chance he might have had something interesting to say, as he’s been through a great deal in recent years. In the end, the only thing of interest he said was highly inappropriate and had more to do with the fashion models than his writing. Nevertheless, Thomas has been referred to, at least in passing, as ‘the father of the New Fiction’—something Thomas strenuously denies, considering he’s technically still a virgin. When pressed as to what technicality he referred to, he decided to demonstrate, which, again in the interests of public health, will not be recounted in this article, but did, ironically, go a long way to explaining why he’s still a virgin.
A fashion parade may seem an unusual place to discuss books, but in Thomas’ case, it’s rather apt. His writing is renowned for having a complete lack of cohesion, and the extent of his extraneous and redundant passages is, at times, breathtaking. So discussing his books in such an unrelated environment is oddly appropriate. When this dichotomy was pointed out, Thomas agreed, although pointed out that it wasn’t nearly as odd as finding someone who wanted to discuss his writing seriously. When I reminded him of the three-hundred requests he’d sent begging us to do so, he admitted surprise that they’d be taken seriously, considering how badly written they were.
GIT Monthly/ ISSUE 03
32
THOMAS CORFIELD